Benign prostate hyperplasia (BPH) and other disorders can cause mechanical bladder outlet obstruction (BOO). A marker for predicting BOO is determining the weight of the bladder wall. Using probing ultrasound, an ultrasound estimated bladder wall weight (UEBW) might be obtained in a non-invasive way. Existing methods for acquiring UEBW assumes that the bladder is spherically shaped and that the thickness of the bladder wall is relatively constant in near empty to nearly full bladders. Moreover, the existing 2D methods are manually based, utilizing leading edge-to-leading edge of opposing bladder walls laboriously executed upon a series of two-dimensional images, and are fraught with analytical inaccuracies (H. Miyashita, M. Kojima, and T. Miki, “Ultrasonic measurement of bladder weight as a possible predictor of acute urinary retention in men with lower urinary tract symptoms suggestive of benign prostate hyperplasia”, Ultrasound in Medicine and Biology 2002, 28(8): 985-990; M. Oelke, K. Hofner, B. Wiese, V. Gruneweld, and U. Jonas, “Increase in detrusor wall thickness indicates bladder outlet obstruction in men,” World J. of Urology, 2002, 19(6), 443-452; L. Muller, T. Bergstrom, M. Hellstrom, E. Svensson, and B. Jacobson, “Standardized ultrasound method for assessing detrusor muscle thickness in children,” J. Urol., 200, 164: 134-138; and Naya, M. Kojima, H. Honjyo, A. Ochiai, O. Ukimura, and H. Watanabe, “Intraobserver and interobserver variance in the measurement of ultrasound-estimated bladder weight,” Ultrasound in Med. & Biol., 1999, 24(5): 771-773).
There is a need to accurately and non-invasively determine bladder wall weight by accurately measuring bladder wall volume to avoid incurring the errors invoked by the fixed bladder shape assumptions and those generated by the manual image processing methods of 2D acquired ultrasound images.